Anti-spam service Truecaller is now a messaging app too

Truecaller, the app that helps screen spam calls and messages, is becoming a chat app as it continues to develop into a social service.

The company announced today that it is introducing a chat feature to its Android and iOS apps, although it is already live for Android beta users.

The move follows Truecaller’s recent foray into payments. That’s a localized push in India — Truecaller’s largest market based on users — based on the acquisition of startup Chillr in June. Beyond adding person-to-person payments through that deal, Truecaller is preparing to allow third-parties to integrate their services into its app. In that context, adding chat makes a lot of sense.

The feature could actually be quite handy for Android users. A Truecaller representative explained to TechCrunch that it will work much like Apple’s iMessage — messages sent between Truecaller users will be handled in the app for free, while messages sent to non-users will go over as SMS, which is supported by the app.

Truecaller also said its move to add messaging will help combat “fake news,” an issue that has plagued WhatsApp in India. The company said it’ll rely on its community to vet and report links, with plans to add AI and machine learning to the process.

While it is doubtless correct that Truecaller has a strong community — the information used to identify spam SMS and phone numbers inside the app comes from community reporting — but the proposed solution isn’t really any different to what Facebook and WhatsApp have talked up. Truecaller won’t have dedicated fact-checkers either. It’s strategy may work within smaller circles, but if the app gains a lot of traction it remains to be seen how it’ll manage the false information problem.

The messaging feature is global, but it promises to make the biggest impact in India, where it highlights how a number of different companies are converging on messaging and payments from very different starting points.

WhatsApp, which claims 200 million users in India, is moving from chat to payments; payment specialist Paytm added chat earlier last year and it just enabled SMS; while Truecaller came from spam detection into payments and now chat.

While it is smaller than WhatsApp and Paytm, Truecaller still boasts an impressive 100 million daily users. The company has said before that 60 percent of its registered users are in India, although it isn’t clear how many of those are active. With chat, Truecaller will hope to grow that number further still before it opens its platform to third parties. That could happen before the end of this year, or in early next year, the company told TechCrunch.

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Google launches voice assistant app to help people with limited mobility use their phones

Google just introduced a new Android app to better enable people with limited mobility to use their phones. Called Voice Access, the app offers people a hands-free way to use apps, write and edit text and, of course, talk to the Google Assistant.

It’s designed to make it easier to control specific functions like clicking a button, and scrolling and navigating app screens. Currently, the app is only available in English, but Google is working on additional languages.

Google created the app in service of people with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and spinal cord injuries, but recognizes that the tool can also be helpful for people whose hands are tied with other tasks.

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The Windows 10 October 2018 Update is now available

Microsoft today announced that the Windows 10 October 2018 update is now available. The company made the announcement at a small press event in New York, though it’s obviously no surprise that Microsoft decided to roll out the October update in the month that gave it its name.

As usual, these rollouts take a while. You can force the update now, but for those who want to wait, Microsoft will start the automatic updates on October 9.

Like most recent Windows updates, the October release isn’t going to blow you away with a new interface or crazy new features. Most of these updates now are incremental, but overall, the new release offers a number of interesting new features.

The most interesting of these is probably the new “Your Phone” app, which allows you to text from your PC using an Android phone that also runs Microsoft’s mobile companion app. In later iterations, that app will also sync notifications to your desktop, but for now, that’s not an option. There also are tools for continuing your workflow as you switch from your phone to PC (or vice versa). These features work for iOS users, too.

As far as syncing between devices goes, it’s worth noting that the update also will allow you to share your clipboard between PCs.

Since everybody likes a dark mode these days, the Windows 10 File Explorer now also includes a dark theme. There’s also a revamped search experience, as well as a new screenshot tool.

While the release includes plenty of other tweaks, both in terms of functionality and design, the most anticipated feature, Sets, didn’t make it into this release. Sets is probably the biggest change to the overall Windows user experience since the release of Windows 10, so maybe it’s no surprise that Microsoft is trying to perfect this. And perfection takes a while.

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iOS 12.1 will come with new emojis

Apple is about to release the public beta version of iOS 12.1. And before everybody freaks out, the company announced that this update will feature new emojis — best feature update ever.

In other words, Apple is releasing its own take on Unicode 11.0 emojis. Other devices and major services will soon all support the same emojis, but with a different design.

Apple already previewed some of these new emoji designs back in July for World Emoji Day. So here’s what you should expect.

Curly hair, grey hair, bald people, red hair…

As always, you’ll be able to find five skin colors in addition to yellow, and all characters come in male and female variants. The Unicode 11.0 specs said that vendors should add "curly hair" emojis. But it looks like Apple concluded "alright let's put a ’stache on that face!"

As for everything else, you’ll find a new emojis for outdoor accessories, such as luggage, compass and hiking shoes. On the food front, you’ll find bagels, salt, cupcakes, leafy greens, mango, moon cake, etc.

And when it comes to animals, there’s finally a mosquito emoji as well as new llama, swan, raccoon, kangaroo, lobster, parrot and peacock emojis.

Every time I’ve written about emojis, the number one comment has always been about red hair. It took a few years but red hair people, the Unicode consortium has finally heard you!

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Vital Labs’ app can measure changes in your blood pressure using an iPhone camera

If a twinkle in the eye of a venture capitalist could predict the longevity of a startup, Vital Labs is going all the way.

During a quick demo of the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup’s app, called Vitality, True Ventures partner Adam D’Augelli’s enthusiasm was potent. The company, which emerges from stealth today, is pioneering a new era of personalized cardiovascular healthcare, he said.

Vitality can read changes in a person’s blood pressure using an iPhone’s camera and graphics processing power. The goal is to replace blood pressure cuffs to become the most accurate method of measuring changes in blood pressure and eventually other changes in the cardiovascular system.

The app is still in beta testing and is expected to complete an official commercial rollout in 2019.

Here’s how it works: The technology relies on a technique called photoplethysmography. By turning on the light from a phone’s flash and placing a person’s index finger over the camera on the back of the phone, the light illuminates the blood vessels in the fingertip and the camera captures changes in intensity as blood flows through the vessels with each heartbeat. This technique results in a time-varying signal called the blood-pulse waveform (BPW). The app captures a 1080p video at 120 frames per second and processes that data in real time using the iPhone’s graphics processing unit to provide a high-resolution version of a person’s BPW.

The startup was founded by Tuhin Sinha, Ph.D., the former technical director for the University of California, San Francisco’s Health eHeart Study. He’s been working on the app for several years.

“Part of the reason this project strikes a chord with me is because if I look at the stats of my own family, I probably only have 20 years left,” Sinha told TechCrunch. “Most people on my dad’s side of the family have passed away before 60 from cardiovascular disease.”

Prior to joining UCSF, Sinha was an instructor at Vanderbilt University and the director of the Center for Image Analysis, where he directed and developed medical image analysis algorithms.

He linked up with True Ventures in June 2015, raising a total of $1 million from the early-stage venture capital firm.

“[Sinha] saw an opportunity to improve a stagnant practice and invented a new approach that takes full advantage of today’s technologies,” True’s D’Augelli said in a statement.

Three years after that initial funding, Sinha says Vital Labs is looking to raise another round of capital with plans to create additional digital tools to advance cardiovascular health.

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Apple expands Business Chat with new businesses and additional countries

Apple Business Chat launched earlier this year as a way for consumers to communicate directly with businesses on Apple’s messaging platform. Today the company announced it was expanding the program to add new businesses and support for additional countries.

When it launched in January, business partners included Discover, Hilton, Lowe’s and Wells Fargo. Today’s announcement includes the likes of Burberry, West Elm, Kimpton Hotels, and Vodafone Germany.

The program, which remains in Beta, added 15 new companies today in the US and 15 internationally including in the UK, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, Italy, Australia and France.

Since the launch, companies have been coming up with creative ways to interact directly with customers in a chat setting that many users prefer over telephone trees and staticy wait music (I know I do).

For instance, Four Seasons, which launched Business Chat in July, is expanding usage to 88 properties across the globe with the ability to chat in more than 100 languages with reported average response times of around 90 seconds.

Apple previously added features like Apple Pay to iMessage to make it easy for consumers to transact directly with business in a fully digital way. If for instance, your customer service rep helps you find the perfect item, you can purchase it right then and there with Apple Pay in a fully digital payment system without having to supply a credit card in the chat interface.

Photo: Apple

What’s more, the CSR could share a link, photo or video to let you see more information on the item you’re interested in or to help you fix a problem with an item you already own. All of this can take place in iMessage, a tool millions of iPhone and iPad owners are comfortable using with friends and family.

To interact with Business Chat, customers are given messaging as a choice in contact information. If they touch this option, the interaction opens in iMessage and customers can conduct a conversation with the brand’s CSR, just as they would with friends.

Touch Message to move to iMessage conversation. Photo: Apple

This link to customer service and sales through a chat interface also fits well with the partnership with Salesforce announced last week and with the company’s overall push to the enterprise. Salesforce president and chief product officer, Bret Taylor described how Apple Business Chat could integrate with Salesforce’s Service Bot platform, which was introduced in 2017 to allow companies to build integrated automated and human response systems.

The bots could provide a first level of service and if the customer required more personal support, there could be an option to switch to Apple Business Chat.

Apple Business Chat requires iOS 11.3 or higher.

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Apple adds student ID cards into Apple Wallet to access buildings, buy food and more

The education market has long been one of the cornerstones of growth for Apple’s hardware business, and today the company is leveraging its popularity in it, specifically among college-aged students, to build out a newer effort. Today, Apple started to integrate university student ID cards — used to access buildings, pay for food or books, and any other transactional campus services — into Wallet, its contactless payment system on the Apple Watch and the iPhone. The first schools to come online are Duke University, the University of Alabama and the University of Oklahoma.

Apple had actually announced the service back in June, during WWDC, earmarking the three schools going live today. It said that Johns Hopkins University, Santa Clara University and Temple University will start using the service by the end of this year.

The expansion comes at a time when Apple is riding on a growth high for its mobile wallet. iPhone and Watch owners have been shown to be enthusiastic users of their devices for making purchases (thrice as more avid, it seems, than Android users), and on the back of that, Apple Pay — which is now live in 24 markets — has laid claim to being the most popular mobile contactless payment in use today, with some 1 billion transactions in the last quarter alone, up three-fold from a year before.

Many of those transactions are specifically related to Apple Pay, made using more traditional payment cards such as American Express or Visa credit cards, and at traditional retail locations — Apple says it expects 60 percent of all US retail locations to support Apple Pay by the end of this year, including over 70 of the top 100 retail chains.

But Apple has also been pursuing a second wave of growth to make Wallet useful, by encouraging people to upload and use the myriad cards they have for various other services, such as loyalty cards and passes for city transport systems. Twelve US metro areas already use Apple Pay, and there is ground being gained internationally too in markets like the UK, China and Japan.

Adding in university student cards falls within that scope, Apple says.

“iPhone and Apple Watch have brought us into a new era of mobility, helping to transform everyday experiences,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, said in a statement. “When we launched Apple Pay, we embarked on a goal to replace the physical wallet. By adding transit, loyalty cards and contactless ticketing we have expanded the capabilities of Wallet beyond payments, and we’re now thrilled to be working with campuses on adding contactless student ID cards to bring customers even more easy, convenient and secure experiences.”

Apple Pay may not appear to massively profit Apple in a direct way — as it’s been pointed out by others, the percentages on payment transactions are tiny — but what it does give the company indirectly is another tie into how people use their phones and watches, making the devices more valuable to their owners, and those users more tied into the Apple ecosystem.

At colleges (and other schools), we’ve seen an increasing use of student ID cards not just as a way to identify yourself, but to access services and buildings, and also to pay for things, and use of contactless versions of these has been on the rise. Part of the reason for this is safety: having one card for everything means students need to carry less valuables, and if they lose it or it’s stolen, the card can be more easily replaced. At the same time, watches and phones are not items they’re leaving behind, so further consolidating, and making those cards more secure by way of Apple’s device locks, makes sense.

What we don’t know is if Apple is getting a commission (even a tiny one) on the payment transactions made via these student cards. We have asked the company and will update as we learn more.

Educational institutions aren’t the only not-strictly-retail locations that are being put into Wallet. Apple’s been adding sports venues to let attendees use Wallet to carry their tickets, and to then buy food and other concessions once you get in. (See how Apple uses one non-commissioned transaction to lead you into using it for one that might be?)

Today, Apple is estimated to account for between 14 percent and 17 percent of the K-12 education market in the US, and with the likes of Google and Microsoft also pushing hard for growth both here and in higher education, you can see how adding in more services like this could help Apple expand its piece of the pie.

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